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Zakaria reveals the fingerprints of white supremacy all over the feminist movement: from early suffragette campaigns right up to the divided and profoundly unequal world we inherit today. And she issues a powerful call to every reader to join her in building a new kind of feminism, lighting the path to emancipation for all

"A radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women's rights. Elite white women have branded feminism, promising an apolitical individual empowerment along with sexual liberation and satisfaction, LGBTQ inclusion, and racial solidarity. As Rafia Zakaria expertly argues, those promises have been proven empty and white feminists have leant on their racial privilege and sense of cultural superiority. Drawing on her own experiences as an American Muslim woman, as well as an attorney working on behalf of immigrant women, Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism that forges true solidarity by bringing Black and brown voices and goals to the fore. Ranging from the savior complex of British feminist imperialists to the condescension of the white feminist-led "development industrial complex" and the conflation of sexual liberation as the "sum total of empowerment," Zakaria presents an eye-opening indictment of how whiteness has contributed to a feminist movement that solely serves the interests of upper middle-class white women"--

Submission -- Purity, necessity unity -- Rebellion -- Feminism -- Submissive or subversive

A new propaganda magazine unveiled this summer by the Pakistani Taliban targets an unexpected audience: women. Journalist Rafia Zakaria describes how the Taliban, who came to power on a promise to eliminate females from the public sphere, are now calling on girls and women to rebel against the strictures of their drab domestic life and join in the jihadi struggle.

Author and columnist Rafia Zakaria critiques the coverage of honor crimes in the West. If the project of honor-crime storytelling is to bring about a moral shift in communities, then the naming-and-shaming model of journalism has failed. Instead, stories need to be directed toward deeper, more contextualized narratives that unlock the how and why of these crimes.

In the last email it sent to journalist James Foley's parents, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) mentioned one person by name: Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. "We have also offered prisoner exchanges to free the Muslims currently in your detention like our sister Dr. Aafia Siddiqui," it said, "however you proved very quickly to us that this is NOT what you are interested in." Days later, Foley was beheaded. More beheadings—gruesome, grotesque, and professionally filmed—have followed, drawing the United States further into the conflict in Iraq and Syria.

In the last email it sent to journalist James Foley's parents, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) mentioned one person by name: Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. 'We have also offered prisoner exchanges to free the Muslims currently in your detention like our sister Dr. Aafia Siddiqui,' it said, 'however you proved very quickly to us that this is NOT what you are interested in.' Days later, Foley was beheaded. More beheadings-gruesome, grotesque, and professionally filmed-have followed, drawing the United States further into the conflict in Iraq and Syria. Adapted from the source document.

That evening, the rally, held at the Baghe-Jinnah, a huge park surrounding the white mausoleum of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, drew thousands of women—young and not so young. Many wore burkas or headscarves or chadors that cocooned their bodies against the open air. The MQM's white-clad volunteers could be seen filing in and out of the orderly queues, directing women to tents providing water, refreshments, bangles, and even tricolor wraps for those nipped by the chill of the February evening.

In the war-ravaged decade following 9/11, every aspect of Muslim women's lives has become a fulcrum of political contestation. From burka bans in Belgium to proposed Sharia bans in Oklahoma and Tennessee, saving Muslim women is advertised as a purported aim for broad and varied campaigns that in actuality have little to do with them. In private conversations and in public forums on these issues, the questions on many lips are inevitably "But doesn't Islam really oppress women?" or "Doesn't Sharia law treat women as second class citizens?" Because these observers see Islam, Sharia, and Muslim women undifferentiated monoliths, the answers to their questions consequently fit the binaries that produce them: good and bad, just and unjust, oppressive and liberating. The assumptions buried inside these perceptions rest on western law, in which gender equality is safe, while in Sharia law, its specter hung with images of hacked hands and stoned women, it is not.The consequence of looking through these prisms is that everyone, reader and writer, scholar and student, is required to pick at team and then sit as onlookers in a civilizational contest that had little room for nuance or dialogue. All writing about Islam and Muslim women must thus ascribe to this paradigm, either an unequivocal defense or a fervid denigration, a prioritization of being either Muslim or female, and always an "either/or" and never ever a uniting "and." The essay presented here is a small rebellion against precisely this arrangement, one that insists that we choose a side, and immediately agree or disagree, before we understand or empathize or make any attempt to feel how the world appears to others seated at different places in the arena or to those in the ring itself. Rather, liberation and justice are complicated issues that defy the construction of neat lines across cultures and contexts and individual lives.